In international comparison, coalition theories and bargaining models have been established as powerful predictors for the tenure of national cabinets. In contrast, regional government cabinets in federal countries have received little attention, despite their advantages regarding theoretical considerations and empirical research: On the one hand, they are situated within the same national political and cultural context, so that potential confounding factors that differ between countries do not have to be controlled for. On the other hand, they provide the opportunity to analyze interdependencies between the different levels of a political system. In this paper, I investigate state cabinet tenure based on an original data set of all 330 cabinets of the German federal states since 1945 using event history analysis. In a competing risks frame, I distinguish between two types of cabinet termination: a) change in the government coalition and b) change of the minister president. In addition to established predictors (numerical attributes of the government and the parliament as well as ideology), the empirical analysis also assesses the impact of federal politics as well as individual characteristics of the minister president on state cabinet survival. My results contribute to the extant literature on cabinet stability in three ways: First, I demonstrate that the variables frequently used in previous research, such as government type, also perform well for the German federal states, in particular in explaining changes in the government coalition. Second, I show that individual characteristics of the minister presidents (e.g. age, experience), which have been neglected in previous research on cabinet stability, determine changes of the minister president. Third, I provide evidence that federal elections and federal trends have an impact on the cabinet stability of federal state governments.
